How to Find Which Areas of Your Site Need A/B Testing

If you’re an online marketer running the majority of your A/B tests on your homepage, you’re missing out on a big opportunity. Don’t get me wrong. Running tests on your homepage is fine, but there are other areas of your site that likely need some optimization. And, with Kissmetrics, you can find them and even track your tests. Read on to see how it’s done…

Using the Funnel Report to Identify Roadblocks

Every SaaS and ecommerce website has a set of steps that each visitor needs to go through before they purchase. Your typical SaaS funnel may look like this:

Visited site

Signed up for a trial

Activated/used product

Credit card billed

Visitors may browse around after visiting the site (e.g., viewing pricing page, features page, about page, etc.), but viewing those pages is not necessary in order to complete signup.

Ecommerce funnels are a little different and may look like this:

Visited site

Viewed product

Added product to cart

Purchased product

Once a marketer views their funnel, they’ll clearly see where visitors drop off.

Let’s use the Kissmetrics Funnel Report for an example ecommerce site to identify where people are dropping off.

We see two major drop-offs here. Only 33% of visitors who viewed a product added a product to their cart. And, of those 25,000 people, only 13% purchased a product. We can test both of these areas, but today we’ll test some ways to increase that 13% conversion rate.

The 25,000 people who added a product to their cart have shown interest in the product, like the price, and have indicated a desire to purchase. Our next step is to dig a little deeper into the purchase process.

Zoom in with Micro Funnels

Getting from adding a product to cart to purchasing involves quite a few steps for many ecommerce companies. It has a few variables as well.

For some ecommerce companies, visitors have to register for an account before they can purchase. Others let visitors complete their purchase first.

Current customers have an easier time. For them, the entire process is only about two steps, from proceeding to checkout to purchasing.

In our example, of the 25,000 people who added a product to their cart, some are registered customers and some are unregistered visitors. We’ll zoom in and focus on the new visitor checkout funnel. This funnel looks at how our new, unregistered visitors move from Added Product to Cart to Purchased Product.

This micro funnel makes it clear that the culprit is converting visitors from the cart page (Added Product to Cart) to Registered. After visitors convert to Registered, about half of them move to Confirmation, and then most of those people purchase.

We’ll start with the area that needs our attention the most. Our goal is to move more people from the cart page to Registered. Before we begin testing some variation pages, we’ll need to gather feedback from people in this area of our site.

Gathering Feedback before Testing

We can jump to dozens of conclusions about why our new visitors don’t move to Registered. They may not be ready to buy, don’t want to register, don’t know shipping costs, don’t feel safe buying from us, are unaware of the return policy, have questions but no one is available to answer, etc.

Instead of guessing what they’re thinking, let’s ask them.

Qualaroo provides one of the best platforms for quickly and easily gathering user feedback. You’ve probably seen them around the web. They’re those small boxes that appear in the bottom right of a page. Here’s how ours will look:

We’ll target the people who have at least one product in their cart, and place it on every page. We’ll wait until we have about 700+ responses and see if we can find trends in the feedback.

Now, let’s fast forward and get our feedback. The majority of responses say they don’t know the shipping costs and don’t want to register for an account if shipping costs are unreasonable.

Once we have this feedback, we can create a variation cart page that includes a shipping calculator.

Tracking the A/B Test

We’ll design the new page and launch it in a tool like Optimizely. The great thing about Kissmetrics is that we don’t have to leave it to track our tests. With the A/B Test Report, we create our test in an A/B testing platform (like Optimizely) and track the results within the Report.

So we’ve launched our new test and it has been running for a few weeks. Let’s check the results in the A/B Test Report.

Here’s the setup for the A/B Test. We’re tracking people who convert to Purchased Product. This is the real strength of the A/B Test Report – it allows you to test any part of your funnel. You aren’t limited to testing to the next conversion step.

We’ll click Run Report and see which page won.

The variant page is a winner the entire way. It clearly performs better at delivering purchases than the original page, which did not have a shipping calculator. And, since we were testing for Purchased Product, we can confidently move forward and push the variant page to 100% of visitors.

Use Kissmetrics’s Engage to Increase Conversions

Engage lets marketers display triggered popups, nudges, and lightboxes that boost conversions. From now until January 2016, you can test-drive Engage as part of your Kissmetrics plan.

In addition to running A/B tests on areas of your site where you lose customers, you can also display an engagement.

For example, let’s say you’re an ecommerce site running a flash sale. To increase awareness of your sale, you display a lightbox that appears on all, or selected, URLs on your site. When visitors click on the lightbox, you can send them to the landing page detailing that flash sale. So you can improve conversions and sales with this lightbox. There’s nothing additional to install, and no code or design resources are needed. It’s all done in Kissmetrics.

Increase Your Success by Improving the Most Underperforming Areas

Here’s a recap of the main points:

Too many A/B tests are run on homepages.

To increase conversions, it’s important to find which areas of your site are underperforming, and run tests there.

Use the Funnel Report to find which parts of your funnel are underperforming.

Create a test in your favorite tool and track the results in the Kissmetrics A/B Test Report.

Use Engage to create popups, nudges, and lightboxes to boost conversions.

Demo

Want to know more about the Funnel Report and the A/B Test Report? Just watch the short videos below, starting with the Funnel Report.

Want to explore Kissmetrics a little more before signing up? No problem. We’ve set up a Demo site where you can poke around and see how Kissmetrics benefits both SaaS and ecommerce businesses. Better yet, request a personal demo to see how Kissmetrics can work for your business.

About the Author: Zach Bulygo (Twitter) is a Content Writer for Kissmetrics.